1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates to a vehicle failure analysis system, vehicle failure analysis apparatus and vehicle failure analysis method that are suitably applied to a vehicle, such as a passenger car, a truck and a bus.
2. Description of the Related Art
In recent vehicles, in order to implement various controls in a vehicle, one or more components that are in-vehicle devices or that constitute in-vehicle devices, sensors that detect various pieces of control information related to these components, and an electronic control unit ECU) that controls these components using these various pieces of control information form a group. A group of these components are connected directly or through communication standard, such as a controller area network (CAN), to one another. Thus, a plurality of types of control systems, typically, such as an intake system, exhaust system and ignition system of an engine, a brake system, a car navigation system and an air conditioning system, are respectively formed.
Japanese Patent Application Publication No. 2006-251918 (JP-A-2006-251918) describes a system that identifies a faulty component on the basis of control information when a failure occurs in any one of control systems. In this system, a monitoring ECU acquires and accumulates control information for the control systems via a CAN, and, when a failure occurs in any one of the components in a vehicle, a center (hereinafter, also referred to as “road-side center” in this specification) provided at a location other than the vehicle collects the control information accumulated in the monitoring ECU via a base station and a network or a wire communication. Then, at the road-side center, the faulty components and the natures of the failures corresponding to these pieces of control information are input by an input device to associate these pieces of control information with the faulty components and the natures of the failures, thus creating a database.
At the above road-side center, after the database is created by associating the faulty components and the natures of the failures with the corresponding pieces of control information and is then stored in a storage medium, such as a hard disk, it is possible to identify a faulty component on the basis of a comparison of the control information, acquired from the above described monitoring ECU by the center, with the database.
However, in the system described in JP-A-2006-251918, the road-side center compares the control information, acquired from the monitoring ECU of the vehicle by the road-side center, with the entire database stored in the road-side center to identify a faulty component. This may increase a processing load for identification.
In addition, in the system described in JP-A-2006-251918, at the vehicle side, when a failure occurs in any one of the components in the vehicle, before a user drives the vehicle to a dealer, or the like, and identifies a faulty component for replacement or repair, it is necessary to carry out fail-safe control over the control system, to which the faulty component belongs, in order to drive the vehicle from a failure site to a dealer, or the like. However, the system is not able to provide information necessary for carrying out the fail-safe control, and is not able to sufficiently provide useful information for control at the time of a failure.